Communities

Writing
Writing
Codidact Meta
Codidact Meta
The Great Outdoors
The Great Outdoors
Photography & Video
Photography & Video
Scientific Speculation
Scientific Speculation
Cooking
Cooking
Electrical Engineering
Electrical Engineering
Judaism
Judaism
Languages & Linguistics
Languages & Linguistics
Software Development
Software Development
Mathematics
Mathematics
Christianity
Christianity
Code Golf
Code Golf
Music
Music
Physics
Physics
Linux Systems
Linux Systems
Power Users
Power Users
Tabletop RPGs
Tabletop RPGs
Community Proposals
Community Proposals
tag:snake search within a tag
answers:0 unanswered questions
user:xxxx search by author id
score:0.5 posts with 0.5+ score
"snake oil" exact phrase
votes:4 posts with 4+ votes
created:<1w created < 1 week ago
post_type:xxxx type of post
Search help
Notifications
Mark all as read See all your notifications »
Q&A

Post History

71%
+3 −0
Q&A Why/how can distro support lifetimes exceed the lifetime of their dependencies (such as Python)?

Motivating example: my Mint 20.3 distribution offers long-term support until April 2025, which matches the "standard support" offered for the upstream Ubuntu (20.04 "Jammy Jellyfish"). However, the...

2 answers  ·  posted 8mo ago by Karl Knechtel‭  ·  last activity 8mo ago by matthewsnyder‭

#1: Initial revision by user avatar Karl Knechtel‭ · 2024-03-29T21:45:16Z (8 months ago)
Why/how can distro support lifetimes exceed the lifetime of their dependencies (such as Python)?
Motivating example: my Mint 20.3 distribution offers long-term support until April 2025, which matches the "standard support" offered for the upstream Ubuntu (20.04 "Jammy Jellyfish"). However, the system-provided Python version is 3.8, which [reaches the end of security support this October](https://endoflife.date/python), half a year earlier.

Similarly, the next LTS Ubuntu release (and corresponding Mint release) are based on Python 3.10, which will similarly EOL half a year before the end of support for the Linux distros. Both Python and Ubuntu/Mint offer a total of 5 years of support (Ubuntu Pro notwithstanding), and Python now has a 1-year release cadence while Ubuntu and Mint do major-version LTS releases every 2 years - so they are advancing in lock-step.

Should I expect my system Python to be automatically updated (or to be prompted for an update) at some point? Or else, why would the maintainers deliberately offer an additional 6 months of support for an OS that depends on a no-longer-supported version of Python?

More generally, how does it make sense to offer this kind of support schedule, outlasting system components that are no longer maintained by their respective authors?